Happy 35th to Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall’

For Pink Floyd, 35 years later, it’s still just another brick in The Wall.

Billboard is reporting that the Pink Floyd rock double album was hardly a collaborative effort. Tensions were rising within the band, with Waters often working in seclusion. The band itself, guitarist and vocalist Waters, lead guitarist and vocalist David Gilmour, drummer Nick Mason and keyboardist Richard Wright, were rarely in the studio together. Each would record their work, then left it to Waters and the engineers to mix and make the album.

Pink Floyd struck initial success with the double album. The Wall spent 15 weeks at number one on the Billboard 200, and the song Another Brick In The Wall II spent four weeks at number one of the Billboard 100, Pink Floyd’s only number one single in its storied career.

The Wall has also spawned a movie, the 1982 cult classic Pink Floyd: The Wall starring Sir Bob Geldof, who was then the lead singer of the Boomtown Rats. In 1990, a star-studded cast including Waters, Cyndi Lauper, Sinead O’Connor. Joni Mitchell, Bryan Adams, and many others, gave a special performance of The Wall in Berlin to commemorate the fall of the Berlin wall eight months previously. Waters then retooled the concept album for a stunning stadium tour that began in 2010 and ran for three years, and would become the fourth-highest grossing stadium tour in history.

Ultimate Classic Rock is reporting that Water’s opus is more of a cathartic effort than anything else. Of the 26 songs on the album, only four share writing credits; David Gilmour and Roger Waters on “Run Like Hell,” “Young Lust” and “Comfortably Numb,” and Bob Ezrin and Waters on “The Trial.” Gilmour provides lead vocals for “Young Lust” and “Comfortably Numb.” All other music and lyrics come completely from Waters himself.

The Wall was, for Waters, an autobiographical catharsis; like Pink, Waters father was killed in World War II, reared by a smothering mother and taught by an overbearing school system, then getting into the music business with all of its excesses. Waters saw the wall he built was to protect himself, but it ended up doing more damage than good.

Waters, at this time, had begun to distance himself from the rock star persona, but also from his fellow bandmates. At one point, things were so bad that Wright finally left the band, though he was hired back to be a touring musician later on the tour. Some time later, when Waters finally left the band, Wright would return the band, teaming with Gilmour and Mason to continue the Pink Floyd name. Wright passed away in 2008 of cancer.

So, Happy 35th to The Wall, Pink Floyd’s greatest, and most damaging, work.

[Image courtesy of Billboard]